Yesterday afternoon, Shell Oil’s titanic drilling rig made its way into the Port of Seattle, where it will undergo repairs before heading north to drill in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s north coast this summer. After local company Foss Maritime inked a secretive lease with the Port to repair two of Shell’s skyscraper-sized oil drilling rigs, the region has been embroiled in a raging controversy over the wisdom of allowing the second largest company in the world to use Seattle as a staging ground for Arctic oil drilling. Shell’s last run at Arctic oil, when the company’s flagship Kulluk drilling rig ran aground near Alaska’s Kodiak Island, was a signal failure, but Shell plans to return to the precarious Arctic seas this summer for another try at tapping the oil reserves.

Shell’s schemes have the region in an uproar, so now is a good time to explore the oil company’s well documented record of interfering in Washington’s politics.

Curiously unlike its major oil company peers (notably Tesoro), Shell makes few direct contributions to candidates for office, preferring to route its political spending through the shadows. During the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, for example, Shell gave a mere $2,500 directly to candidates in Washington: $2,000 to Democratic Congressman Rick Larsen (a perennial winner of fossil fuel industry spending) and $500 to Republican Congressman Doc Hastings. In 2012, Shell also gave $60,000 to the conservative Association of Washington Business PAC, a group that has been an intractable opponent of Governor Inslee’s Carbon Pollution Accountability Act, as well as other clean energy reforms.

Yet the rest of the oil giant’s spending in Washington—and it’s a lot—is much harder to track. From 2010 to 2014, Shell spent $396,187 on lobbying, a vague term usually associated with hiring representatives to interact with legislators. But lobbying expenditures can also be used to secretly funnel funds to projects and politicians—and Shell has done so with gusto.

“Pushing Shell’s colossal rig out of Elliott Bay is one thing. Ridding Washington’s democracy of the company’s influence is quite another.”

Stay up to date on the Northwest's most important sustainability issues.

Research Areas

Founded in 1993, Sightline Institute is committed to making the Northwest a global model of sustainability, with strong communities, a green economy, and a healthy environment. We work to promote smart policy ideas and monitor the region's progress towards sustainability. Sightline Institute is non-partisan and does not oppose, support, or endorse any political candidate or party.